PRESS RELEASE #00-68 November 6, 2000 CONTACT: (media inquiries only) Brigid Quinn 703-305-8341   USPTO WEB DATABASE NOW INCLUDES ALL PATENTS DATING FROM 1790 The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has expanded its 2 million patent Web database to include every United States patent ever issued, a total of more than 6.5 million patents. The database now offers the public an additional 1.7 terabytes of full-page images for the 4,204,863 US patents issued from 1790 through 1975. Patents issued from 1790 through 1975 are searchable by patent number and current US patent classification; patents issued from 1976 to the most recent issue week are searchable by full-text fields that now include current US classification data. To facilitate database searches, USPTO's Manual of Classification has been enhanced to help users find all patents in a particular category of invention. "USPTO's database, which is updated weekly with the latest in patented technology, represents the history of science and technology that has made the United States economy the strongest in the world," said Q. Todd Dickinson, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. USPTO has also added two additional database web servers and doubled the available Internet bandwidth to accommodate ever-increasing public use of the patent database. The agency has added two terabytes of additional disk storage to the two terabytes previously allocated for Patent Images on the Web. For more information, see the patent database Web page at http://www.uspto.gov/patft/ USPTO, a user fee-funded agency of the United States, within the Department of Commerce, administers laws relevant to granting patents and registering trademarks. The Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office advises the Secretary of Commerce and other Federal departments and agencies on intellectual property policy matters. Over 6 million patents have been issued since the first patent in 1790 and 2.3 million trademarks have been registered since the first in 1870. Last year USPTO issued 161,000 patents and registered 104,000 trademarks. # # #